From inappropriate bridesmaid dresses to deceptions unmasked during bedtime stories, these gimlet-eyed miniatures from the acclaimed author of Early Morning Riser tackle the complexities of love in all its forms.
The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings us eleven glittering stories of love - friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts - in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.
The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny's characters range from mischievous to tender.
In Bridesmaid, Revisited, Marilee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid's dress to work. In Twist and Shout, Ericka's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In Turn Back, Turn Back, a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in 561, Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home.
From one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, Katherine Heiny has delivered a work of glorious humour and immense kindness.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008395148
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 350 g
Dimensions: 222 x 141 x 24 mm
Praise for Games and Rituals ‘Heiny has the comic writer’s knack of taking a character’s idiosyncrasies (…) and making them joyfully relatable. (And she can say more in a pithy parenthesis than many writers manage in a page.) She has a genius for spinning universality out of the absurdly specific’THE GUARDIAN ‘Superb… as near perfection as, say, Donald Trump is far from it… Heiny is habitually congratulated for writing feelgood stories, but if these pointed, satirical, emotionally ruthless takes on humanity merely made me feel good, I wouldn’t value them half as much.’THE TIMES ‘For any reader yet to encounter Katherine Heiny, this sparky new story collection provides a joyous introduction…The deadpan delivery, the bittersweet wisdom, the sublime farce – it’s all here.’THE OBSERVER Anyone who has read any of Heiny’s previous work will know she has a knack for capturing all the vicissitudes of love in a way that few other writers can. Games and Rituals is no different, bringing the minutiae of our everyday interactions to life with humour and clarity.’iNEWS Short stories sometimes leave you wanting more but each one in this collection is as satisfying as any novel… All human life is here and Heiny exposes its complexity with wit and poignancy’GOOD HOUSEKEEPING ‘I’m a devoted fan of Katherine Heiny. I can’t think of another writer who manages to gets so under the skin of her characters…These might be short stories but each one contains multitudes.’RED MAGAZINE ‘Games and Rituals, full of relatably weird characters discovering their self-deceptions, proves her to be the most pleasurable architect of the short story form writing today…Her radar for people’s eccentricities is exquisite’INDEPENDENT ‘Witty, astute and delightfully accessible’SUNDAY TIMES
I absolutely loved this short story collection - each story was unique and vivid, full of life, and mesmerising. Such different stories ranging through many situations in life - from a father eating his hearing aid,... More
This is a short story collection with a focus on the complexity of love and connection in different forms. Heiny brilliantly captures snippets of life in a realistic, poignant and often comedic way. Each story in... More
This collection of short stories from Katherine Heiny is a book I could not put down. Depicting the behind the scenes of everyday life from couples, to mothers to best friends, Heiny presents humanity as flawed,... More
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